Ines has gotten a second chance in the form of acceptance to Catherine House, a nontraditional, highly exclusive private university with a specialty in the mysterious “new materials.” All tuition, fees, and housing are paid, but students must agree to give themselves up entirely to Catherine House for the three years of their education — contact with the outside world is strictly regulated, and students can’t even access their phones. The longer Ines remains at Catherine House, the more clearly she realizes that something is wrong here, perhaps even that the students are being used in some kind of experiment.

In some senses, Catherine House is a very classic campus novel. Ines is surrounded with people whose personalities, ideas about themselves, and opinions about Catherine House and its mysteries are perpetually shifting. While at first Ines thinks her friend Yaya is straightforwardly a party girl, Yaya becomes a source of solidity and support in later years, doing her best to stay true to her ideals and her friends in a situation designed to separate them. Another friend, Theo, doesn’t interest Ines much until she thinks she can get something out of him; then she comes to truly care for him; then [redacted for spoilers, but I shivered thinking about it]. As you do at college, Ines is constantly searching for herself in the people around her. The reader is never quite sure what kind of person she is, because she’s not certain what kind of person she is. And Catherine House is set up to ensure that she’s perpetually on the back foot, forever questioning her sense of reality as she navigates an institution built on the gaslighting of its students.

Though I didn’t intend it this way, Catherine House makes a fascinating companion read to Megan Gidding’s Lakewood (though with less body horror!). In both books, young women of color become enmeshed in institutions whose intentions are very unclear. Just as Lena is drawn to Lakewood by the promise of a reliable salary and health insurance, Ines comes to Catherine House in the hope of getting a prestigious college degree that would not have been otherwise available to her, with all the privilege such a degree carries with it. The two books are each premised on the idea that the American dream of prosperity and security is a scam designed to reserve itself for the privileged while it preys upon the bodies of the vulnerable and marginalized.

The next paragraph will contain spoilers! You are warned!

As y’all know if you’ve hung around here for a while, I’m always delighted when literary fiction includes speculative elements, as Catherine House does: Though it’s marketed as a Gothic novel for a litfic audience (which is accurate, btw!), it contains SF elements that only become clear towards the end, and Thomas has said that her writing always contains speculative elements — which bodes well for her future career in terms of me enjoying all her books. If I had to identify what would make me shelve it in litfic rather than SF, it’s the ending, which btw I loved. Rather than giving us a clear resolution to Ines’s three-year battle to understand and reside in Catherine House, Thomas leaves us with uncertainty. Maybe Ines achieves her freedom in the end, or maybe they pull her back in. Thomas leaves it to the reader to decide what we believe, and I loved that.

The post Review: Catherine House, Elisabeth Thomas appeared first on Reading the End.

Even now if I think about certain scenes in the novel, it brings tears to my eyes. And the beauty of it is that nothing in this novel is overworked or melodramatic. It’s the hush, the lonely hopefulness, the complexity of love and disappointment that drive the narratives of everyday life that really shine here.

So when the author’s publicist contacted me to offer me a review copy, I was delighted and said yes at once. Addie meets Roland when they’re just kids, and they have that kind of relationship that if Addie was one of your friends, you’d urge her to lay off spending time with that guy and find someone who’s worthwhile. (Addie’s friends do just this, in fact.) Roland tells her that she’s the only one who really understands him; she sits on an amp and listens to him play music. Many years later, discontented with her life, Addie goes to stay with him in Los Angeles, where he’s doing drugs and trying to make it as a musician. She gets pregnant; her attempt at an abortion doesn’t work; and in absolute secret, she has the baby and gives it up for adoption.

Byrd is about coming to terms with what you have to give. When Addie falls pregnant, she knows from the first that she doesn’t have motherhood to give, and Roland doesn’t have fatherhood either; and neither of them can give the permanent tangling together of their lives that mutual parenting would require. Perhaps they want to be able to give some of these things, but they just don’t have them (then).

Kim Church, the author, doesn’t make value judgments about the things her characters are doing. She’s just telling a story, and her writing has a wonderful, spare specificity that I loved. She resists almost completely the urge to throw characters into conflict with each other. Instead she just gives us their actions, at different points in their lives, and the reader is left to decide whether they could have been better and done more. It’s a generous way of writing, to be calm about the worst of her characters and calm about their best.

He pulls her closer and presses her head into his shoulder. Her face soaks his shirt. He doesn’t care. He isn’t thinking about himself, not yet. It’s too soon; he doesn’t need to think that far ahead. “It’s okay,” he says, keeping his voice deep and even. “Just tell me what you want me to do. Tell me, and I’ll do it.” He has no idea what this means, for himself or for her, but he likes the sound of it. Solid, convincing, strong. Stronger than he has ever been.

It’s my opinion that most people, most of the time, are trying to be good, though they do not always succeed, and the world does not always cooperate. Byrd reflects that idea. The most clearly selfish and unkind decision Addie makes in the book allows a great deal of good to spring up in Roland’s life, and her most good decision brings him disaster. That she never finds out about any of it was possibly my favorite aspect of the book, and the thing that rang the most true.

Family drama sorts of fiction are not generally my thing, but I’m glad Priscilla recommended Byrd. It’s a beautifully quiet book with the kind of ending I like the best.

The post Byrd, Kim Church appeared first on Reading the End.

No one else was going to get killed today, not if she could save them. Certainly not someone she’d once thought she loved, even if he was a jerk. Not some dead boy full of good advice. And she hoped not herself either.

So she saves them.

The end (spoilers in this section only! Skip it if you don’t want to know!): Oo, lots of characters I don’t know. That’s the worst. But on the upside, lots of talking about what’s happened so far. Evidently Tana is infected, and she saves her little sister before staying in Coldtown to try to ride out the infection. (You can be human again if you survive for eighty-eight days without finishing the transformation by drinking human blood.) Also she evidently killed two vampires I haven’t met yet, bully for her, and Gavriel tells her he loves her, in a weirdly charming way:

“I love you, you see — and I fear I have no way to say or show it that isn’t terrible, except coming here. I would kill everyone in the world for you, if you wanted.” He seemed to notice the look that passed over her face, before rushing on. “Or not, obviously.”

Or not, obviously.

And then the ending is ambiguous as to whether Tana does manage to ride out the infection, or whether she gives in and becomes a vampire, or what. This kind of ending is good because, really, you know she probably dies. But you can choose to believe she’s tough enough to live, without feeling that the author has undercut the seriousness of the stakes.

The whole: Evidently I’m back from my vampire hiatus. My expectations for The Coldest Girl in Coldtown were low; or actually, my expectations for my own ability to enjoy a YA vampire novel were low. I thought I might never enjoy another YA vampire novel ever because all I’d be able to think about would be the uncomfortable relationship between sex and death that vampires represent, and how weird and yucky that is in books marketed to teenage girls who already have lots of conflicting (and scary) messages about sex. So really all The Coldest Girl in Coldtown had to do was not repel me.

Which it did! Hooray! It did because of this line:

“You can’t win when someone else makes all the rules,” Pauline warned her. Tana didn’t listen.

Pauline is saying this in reference to Tana’s relationship with her then-boyfriend, Aidan, whom Tana is determined to be cooler and chiller than (not like all the crazy girls he dated before her), but it’s a pretty good precis of the book. Tana is  always playing a game she can’t win, a game where someone else has made all the rules. Though she knows this, she ignores it: She keeps on fighting to win, no matter how impossibly the odds are stacked against her.

Gavriel could have been a serious failure of this book: He’s a centuries-old vampire who has a soft spot (or more) for a teenaged human girl. Holly Black dodges this as best it can be dodged by making Tana ferocious. Her rescuing of herself and the people around her isn’t particularly due to her being the specialest of snowflakes. It’s due to her being dogged, and pissed off, and unwilling to hand a win to the people who have pissed her off. When she asks Gavriel what he sees in her, he tells her: “In all my long life, though there were many times I prayed for it, no one has ever saved me. No one but you.”

That’s a pretty good reason, actually.

All of which to say that the representations of gender in this book were very good. With Twilight as a cultural backdrop, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown gets a lot of points from me for its easy avoidance of the many pitfalls of teenaged-girl-meets-mysterious-powerful-boy stories. As a story qua story, though, the plot doesn’t fully succeed. There are several important revelations in the final third of the book that should have felt staggering, but instead fell a little flat. Black hasn’t built enough of the world to make revelations about the world seem important; it’s only the characters that she’s made matter.

That said, she makes the characters matter quite a bit, and for that alone, I recommend The Coldest Girl in Coldtown. It’s fun, and I like Tana as much as I’ve liked any YA heroine in quite a while.

Affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository

The post Review: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, Holly Black appeared first on Reading the End.